A group of Italian high school students stayed in the Potočari Memorial Center and in Srebrenica yesterday and today.
Professor Emanuela came here four years ago with her students. Now she came with several colleagues bringing a group of students from Parma, Italy.
“We came on a study trip under the motto “Remembering Bosnia” and first we were in Mostar, then in Sarajevo, and here we are at the Potočari Memorial Center in Srebrenica. There are fifty students and teachers from five high schools in Parma. We came to find out more and learn about what happened here during the war in the 1990s,” says the Italian woman, N1 reports.
In order to get better acquainted with the current life of people in Srebrenica, young people stayed in the houses of Srebrenica residents, and another reason is that today there is not a single hotel or boarding house in Srebrenica.
Years after the war, organized groups of foreigners came to Srebrenica. Italians are the most frequent foreign guests in Srebrenica and for years they come for different reasons, but essentially with the same goal, to get to know Bosnia and Herzegovina, its people, natural beauty and learn more about the war that took place in the period from 1992 to 1995 in these areas.
Several people are responsible for the arrival of a large number of Italians in Srebrenica. It all started in 2005 when neuropsychiatrist Dr. Irfanka Pašagić, who recently passed away from Srebrenica with an address in Tuzla, received the international award of the Italian Aleksander Langer Foundation, an award that has been awarded since 1997 to people who actively work for freedom, democracy, justice and coexistence.
After receiving this award, wanting to help her hometown in some way, she initiated the first “Week of Remembrance” event, first as part of an informal group that soon grew into the “Adopt Srebrenica” association. Since then, this association has been working on various projects with partners from Italy, and they are often approached for help in the organization by others who bring groups of Italians to Srebrenica.
Andrea Rizza Goldstein was in Srebrenica for the first time in 2006 quite by accident, and then from 2010 until today, working for the “Aleksander Langer” Foundation, he is regularly in Srebrenica several times a year, usually as an organizer, leader and translator for groups of young people, as well as the elderly Italians who come on multi-day excursions to Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which a visit to Srebrenica is unavoidable.
“The young people I bring are students in their final year of high school and they learn half a page about the war in Yugoslavia in the history of the 20th century. They are most interested in why we in the West, so to speak, still do not understand where Europe is. When the war in Ukraine started, it was a collective shock and we asked ourselves how it is possible that there is a war in Europe, the first after the Second World War? It’s as if there was no war in Bosnia, because it is not considered a European war in our country,” says a man who feels at home in Srebrenica.
A large number of people from Srebrenica know him, and he also speaks our language well because his father is Italian, and his mother is Jewish from Zagreb, where he lived with his grandmother until he was seven years old.
Irvin Mujčić is another young man who is responsible for the arrival of a large number of Italians in Srebrenica. Irvin is a native of Srebrenica who, due to wartime circumstances, grew up and was educated in Italy. In addition to his native language, he also speaks Italian, French and English. He worked in Tunisia, Egypt and Belgium, but eight years ago he returned to his hometown. He is a great lover of nature and first had the idea to build a “House of Nature” here, which would be in the form of a hostel or mountain lodge, so he stayed in the village of Osmače for a while and brought groups of young people mostly from Italy, but also from other countries.
The visitors were delighted with the local food, sleeping with the locals and their stories about the past and present life in the village, as well as the events of the war. He then bought a rural property in the middle of the forest, between two rivers near the villages of Lipovac and Slapovići, about 12 kilometers from Srebrenica, and there he started and is still building an ethno-village.
Speaking about the facilities he offers to his guests – foreigners, Irvin says that he mostly does hiking tours along the Drina river canyon and visits to the “Drina” National Park.
“On these tours, we go to villages where we spend the night in the houses of the locals, and we serve the tourists homemade dishes prepared in the traditional way, which is a big attraction for them. The locals also benefit because they earn something like that. In the ethno-village, where mostly young people come, guests can learn a lot or find peace and inspiration for writing and painting. We organize some kind of multi-day courses. This year, for the first time, we had a writing course for a group of students from Italy who came with the professor,” says Mujčić.
Visitors who come to Srebrenica for several days and have the opportunity to visit at least part of other cultural and historical monuments and natural beauties in addition to the Memorial Center will be delighted by the beauty of the Srebrenica villages, the surrounding nature and the hospitality of the local people.
